CD review: Sufjan Stevens, The Age of Adz

Well, we’ve come a long way from crying in vans for freedom, haven’t we? Sufjan Stevens’ last proper album, Illinois (2005), was his most confident album to date — a collection of indie folk-pop with the ambition cranked up to nine. His new album, The Age of Adz (pronounced “odds”) finds the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist in an even more confident mood, the ambition almost implausibly higher this time around. It also has the feel of a transitional album for the Brooklyn-by-way-of-Detroit artist, providing a solid path for Stevens to further explore and refine on future projects.

The biggest shift from Illinois comes in the album’s instrumentation. Whereas Stevens has never shied away from expansive, sea-parting orchestration, The Age of Adz introduces an electronic sheen to the proceedings, forcing synths to play nice with Lawrence Welk strings and glitchy fuzz to make friends with polished pop sounds. Of course, Stevens isn’t the first to add digital elements to his music, and it’s not a fundamental about-face for him, either.

The perky Too Much features the kind of honest-to-God bass that you might find at a rave, and I Walked marches to a dubby, slightly off-kilter beat. Get Real Get Right, an ode to making peace with one’s self and finding spiritual inspiration, flutters with darting, hummingbird-quick strings and throbs with brass instruments of all sort. It’s the kind of almost-toppling-over arrangement that only Stevens could construct; on The Age of Adz, he doesn’t tune into a different station so much as adjust the signal of the one he’s already locked into.

Another change is visible in Stevens himself. At times he’s been painted as too soft and fragile, without enough edge — in other words, too sincere in a world of ironic distance. It’s that image that he works not to dispel entirely, but to add layers to. Throughout his career, Stevens has mostly remained in a comfort zone of hushed vocals and pretty, gentle performances. So when he sings more like a pop than folk star, on songs such as the title track or Bad Communication, pushing his soft voice into uncharted territory, as if something important is at stake — it feels alive and vital.

An even more exhilarating moment comes on I Want to Be Well, the album’s penultimate track. After three minutes of declaring his desire for health both physical and mental, Stevens gets on his knees and looks to the heavens, shouting “I’m not f***ing around!” until the song almost falls apart. Coming from the mild-mannered musician, it’s a glorious moment of catharsis, and well-earned, too.

His songwriting might seem less of a concern at first glance, the verses downplayed in favour of the many hooks on The Age of Adz. It’s true that amid all the multi-part harmonies and bombast the verses seem less developed, but that’s really not the case. Much like the National’s latest album High Violet, The Age of Adz is all about the hooks.

Both the National and Stevens spend their new albums crafting undeniable hooks and then letting them loose, seeing how they can grow and evolve simply through giving them space to breathe and building everything around them. Think of The Age of Adz as the indie version of The-Dream’s latest R&B album, Love King — and considering the latter is one of the best records of the year, that’s good company for Stevens to keep. — Renato Pagnani, Edmonton Journal

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